Crowdsourcing African American History

The National Museum of African American History and Culture has launched a Web presence years before the museum itself will open its doors in Washington. The idea is, partly, to crowdsource black history.

Soliciting historical material from visitors to virtual museums is not new, but the content already, less than a week into the adventure, is quite powerful. Twenty-two items were posted as of this writing, some including wonderful family photos. Read I Thought They Were Going to Kill Us All,  a first-person report by Joey Robinson reflecting on a singular, tragic experience in Newark in 1967. This stuff passes the user-generated-content quality bar easily.

IBM donated the technology, and having a (relatively) strong tech partner has already paid off.

The main pages feature threadmaps that illustrate links between content contributions. The display on the home page isn’t very well-settled, but click to open up the map on an inside page for a fascinating way to engage with the stuff.

Threadmaps are familiar to information architecture geeks and 2.0 communitarians. But this is the most mainstream use of this technology I’ve seen. With few entries so far the map navigates well. We’ll see what happens when the social network builds and hundreds and thousands of content items pile up.

The public contribution effort, called Memory Book, asks people to geotag and date submissions for eventual display via maps and timelines.

One timeline is already in progress. I have no idea what you call the navigation scheme is uses. It combines a slider with two timelines, one static, full-span timeline from the 1600s to today and another detail-view timeline below. Both lines use transparent graphics to indicate volume of material available at each period. Once you click on a year or period, a text box below spools out details about each event. That’s a lousy description, so check it out yourself. Frankly the usability is not very good.

Saddest detail: All public contributions be vetted for, among other things,  content that incites racial or ethnic hatred.

Newspaper Teen Video Contest: [src= "existentialscream.wav"]

Following is a description of a new teen-outreach initiative by the National Newspaper Association, the NAA Foundation Teen Video Contest. The winner receives an iPhone and a trip for two to Washington, D.C.

I’d ask whether this is irony or desperation, but newspapers have very little experience with irony.

The Basics

To enter the contest, create a YouTube video explaining how you incorporate newspapers into your daily lives – for anything from acing a current events test to staying informed about what’s happening in your community and the world around you. Send the link to us at needtoknow@naa.org.

See a video promoting the contest here.

The Future of Magazines

There have been two interesting reports in the last couple of days on the state of ink-on-paper magazines, which (may) be less threatened by new media than newspapers. There’s a thoughtful interview with Betsy Frank, who holds the title chief research and insights officer for Time Inc., on the site jackmeyers.com. Her point: Magazines offer “relaxation, inspiration, and trust. . .combined with the digital promise of personalized content, passionate communities, and consumer control.” Self interested? Sure. But not necessarily wrong.

And yesterday came a report on the Folio website that magazines have (barely) passed newspapers in the battle for advertising market share.

Yes, magazines do have a cuddle-up factor, along with shelf life, that newspapers don’t. This could indeed help them sustain a place in the media life of even the more digitized consumers.

And, liberated from the duty of delivering daily news, many of them are also doing some very interesting things digitally that take them beyond many newspaper initiatives.

• Consumer Reports is posting free videos of its crash-test-dummy tests by make, brand and year
• Meredith Corp. just purchased Realage.com, a slightly hokey but very popular personal health assessment and management site. It previously purchased Healia, an excellent vertical search engine in the health space that filters out crap and provides clean, filterable results. Meredith plans to deploy the search across its titles that draw health-seeking readers.
• Playboy has created a area in Second Life and a PlayboyU, a kind of social networking site for coeds. In another startling innovation, it has added twelve non-nude screensavers to its offerings.
• Low Rider magazine has added social networking features.

The First Day of the Rest of Maureen Dowd’s Life

This from Maureen Dowd’s column in the New York Times, which has finally been liberated from behind the pay wall the company had built around its marquee columnists under its ill-fated TimesSelect plan:

“Nobody wants to simply admit they made a mistake and disappear for awhile. Nobody even wants to use the weasel words: ‘Mistakes were made.’ No, far better to pop right back up and get in the face of those who were savoring your absence.”

Such a striking confession about her employer’s embarrassing capitulation to reality! From such a proud woman!

Oh, wait, my mistake.

The column’s about Alan Greenspan’s new book. And Republican Sen. Larry Craig, trying to come back from his bathroom break. And something about Donald Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell.  It’s a sort of rambling roundup of recent news reported in The Washington Post, GQ magazine, and the New York Times itself, all about attempted comebacks by various scoundrels. A sassed-up Google News search.

Now, free and available to all. More proof that you get what you pay for?

The Usability Tube Review: GoreTube

So Al Gore, the Oscar-winning producer of “An Inconvenient Truth,” is now an Emmy-winning proprietor of the online/cable venture Current. He went on stage at the ceremony and talked about how Current is putting the demos back in democracy, etc., yada, blah, and so on. Bully for him, I say.
But let’s forget civic mission for a moment and look at this proto-network’s onscreen fare and see how it stands up against our Usability Tube criteria.

 

Recall our analysis of web video has nothing to do with platforms, partnerships, poohbahs or (in this case) politics. It’s all about how the stuff being projected on the tiny screen holds up to the question: Would anybody actually watch this stuff?

The Sell

“Current is a global television network that gives you the opportunity to create and influence what airs on TV.”

The Reality

“Current is YouTube with an East Coast college education and a protracted attention span for content about liberal causes.”

Medium-Message Match Downgrades for inane video fad-mongering; upgrades for content best conveyed by video rather than another medium.

A maddeningly mixed bag, though I supposed that’s to be expected from Viewer Created Content (VC2, in Current patois). The material on the home page is definitely best-face-forward material–smart and frisky and likably self-aware. But go deeper, especially into the news and politics channel, and you’ll find stuff where both message and medium need serious work. It’s full of earnest talking-head screeds and self-indulgent junior-varsity documentaries which try to go “long-form” with reports on [fill in your favorite environmental, anti-war, anti-Bush, anti-drug-company, anti-Da-Man cause here]. Like all bad political rhetoric, the work confuse expressions with communication. Yet there are also some brisk eye-openers: Freeway Blogger is a sped-up demo of how one guys posts cardboard sloganalia such as “Impeach Bush” along interstates (favorite placard slogan: “We’re all wearing blue dresses now”). And there is also a cheerfully vulgar musical number called “Lonely Dem07″ (2:19) which extols Democrats, “Don’t be pus**es” and uses quick-cut news footage edits to great comic effect. Most “professional” videos on the site, however, plod like Jim Lehrer Newshour reports without the punchline. Score: 2 out of 5 rabbit ears

Respect for users’ time and attention Upgrades for tight editing; downgrades for excessive length and production incontinence.

Rampant production incontinence: It’s hard to find videos that come in under 2:00 (which, as I’ve said before, and will continue to say until my fingers bleed, should be the legal limit for web video). Even 3:00 and 4:00 productions are hard to come by. There are many 6:00 and 7:00 stemwinders (to use an ancient analog metaphor). Would someone please do usability testing with the videos on this site, and send the results out to both amateur and professional Web videographers? And to the folks who run Current? Today? Score: 1 out of 5 rabbit ears

Commercial Time-Suck Upgrades for space- and time-efficient ad presentation; downgrades for tedious, excessive commercials that cannot be avoided.

Pristine; no obligatory wall of ads before videos. You’ll see the odd opening placard for the production company. [The programming is broadcast on cable TV, so the obligation to amortize Web eyeballs here is lower than for most webvid operations.] Viewer-Created Ad Messages, done by amateurs on behalf of sponsors, are posted but easy to ignore. The site’s navigation and usability are world-class. Score: 5 out of 5 rabbit ears

Innovation Upgrades for inventive use of the video medium; downgrades for pack-following video production rites.

Stick with the home page and some of the favorites, and you’ll find some smart use of video: SuperNews is an animated satirefest. InfoBlast is an ironic take on the news and on itself as a news medium. Safari Joe may be the strangest thing to come out of Germany since Silbermond. Elsewhere: A lot of same-old, same-old, but on the web. Score: 3 out of 5 rabbit ears

Net score for Current: 2.75 out of 5 rabbit ears

Bottom Line: The greatest value of Current is the site’s main conceit: substantial programming that  is filtered first by humans for (at least) taste, and then subjected to the usual  wisdom-of-the-crowds mashing up. This has the benefit of limiting both UGC (user-generated crap) and, for viewers, the wave of self-loathing that can follow a YouTube clickathon.

The service also suffers, at least in its web presentation, from the same problems that face any video made for TV and ported to a screen the size of a jack of clubs. Material that creates a decent experience on the big screen–where user expectations, eye movement, related options, and even body posture are so different from what they are online–often suffers on the web.

Funny about Current’s first level of professional content vetting, though. If any pro-conservative, anti-progressive video has wiggled through the filter, I couldn’t find it.

If it’s there, please send me the URL. Democracy isn’t coming back any time soon unless everybody’s invited to the party.

Web 2.D’oh! Round-Up, Vol. VIII

If it’s Friday, it’s time again for our weekly whiskbrooming of the dust, detritus and details that fluttered onto the floor of the 2.0ffice recently.

Dude, Where’s My . . .Self-Respect?

In a play to enter a tragically underserved market on the web–teenaged and young adult males–the folks at Viacom announced that they will next year consolidate a number of guysites into something called spike.com.

If the current SpikeTV site is any indication, the Viacommers have Rupert Murdoch’s AskMen.com site beat in the how-low-can-you-go competition. By a long shot. To suggest some Spike content is soft-core porn would be generous indeed. [Click on Homepage Top 100 if you don't believe me.] By comparison, AskMen comes off as downright gentlemany. Stay on the high road, Rupe!

Video That’s Not Hideo

Here’s something I don’t see very often: Video that serves a purpose on the Web. One of my nerdy-favorite sites, lifehacker.com, this week posted a round-up of well-done do-it-yourself videos. A favorite is “How to Buy a Car Without Getting Screwed.” [Though at 5:53 it breaks my 2-minute rule.]

One of the scariest is–I am not making this up–”How to turn a flashlight into a handheld burning laser.” After posting, the video sprouted this useful bit of essential derriere attire: UPDATE: Several readers rightly point out that your burning handheld laser could pose a safety risk to humans, especially when pointed at eyeballs. Watch your kids, proceed at your own risk, treat as you would a weapon, etc. Thank you.

Genuinely Interesting Item of the Week

Don’t miss the list of finalists in the Online News Association’s annual Online Journalism Awards.  [As with most such competitions, the finalists' list is always richer than the final list of winners.]  

Leaders in the obscure-but-great division include:

NewsOK.com , the site of an group of Oklahoma media companies that’s far more sophisticated than most of its coastal brethren

HoopGurlz [resist nanny-nanny-boo-boo at Don Imus here] 

Assignment: Guatemala, a very ambitious multimedia investigation into an unsolved group of three murders, produced by the tiny (though Gannett-owned) Journal News of the Lower Hudson Valley. [Oddly, this feature is listed in the "service journalism" rather than "investigative journalism" category. Explanation, anyone?]

CNet.com’s “Vista for the Masses,” a full-out, scramble-the-jets, spare-no-cost, hose-the-competition report on Microsoft’s new operating system.

Everybody knows the big media brands and what they can do online. The pleasure of clicking through this list is to see how many truly remarkable obscurities are out there–and too often overlooked.

And finally, our Noted Without Comment feature

Zappos Targets the Shoeless Flier

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